Give Back the Loot, Rehab the Wronged..... Then you’re a Hero!
What with the just completed and inconclusive UNCAC meeting against corruption and the similarly ineffective conclusion to the UNFCCC on global warming meeting a few weeks back, Bali seems to be becoming the venue of choice for Indonesia to address its most sensitive issues and for the world to boot all major international problems into touch until 2009. Indonesia is No.3 on the world list of Co2 emitters after the US and China, and is the 143rd most corrupt country out of 179 in the 2007 CPI index from Transparency Intl., so it must say something about Indonesia’s willingness to address its challenges and the world in general to defer them.
To add poignancy to the proceedings they took place at the time of ex-President Suharto’s death, thus preventing the current President of Indonesia, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, from attending the conference. Suharto is routinely referred to in the Indonesian and international press as Indonesia’s ex-dictator and by the World Bank and the UN itself as the “most corrupt former leader in the world”.
While Indonesia and its media plunged into a curious death vigil and a debate as to whether Suharto should be forgiven his wrongdoings, declared a national hero or posthumously brought to book for his crimes, or at very least for the historical record to be set straight and the money returned, the world press almost uniformly dwelt on the brutality and kleptocratic nature of his 33-year rule, wiping out the undeniable economic advances of the first two decades and ignoring his role in maintaining the stability of SE Asia during very turbulent times.
Coup & Counter Coup
The New York Times described him as “one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators of the 20th century”, which seems a tad overstated in a century which gave us mega killers like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, not to mention lesser monsters Pol Pot and Sadam Hussein. That Suharto was a ruthless dictator is hardly in question. How else do you maintain autocratic rule for 33 years? That he was one of the most corrupt leaders in modern history, there can be little doubt. He came to power in the murky events following G30S in October 1965 when six right wing ABRI generals were murdered in an apparent coup attempt by left wing generals supported by the PKI in an attempt to pre-empt a suspected coup by a right wing junta, egged on by the British and US. From October 1965 to July 1966 there followed a counter terror on a terrible scale engineered by Suharto and his fellow generals, which according to estimates accounted for the loss of life of anywhere between 500,000 to a million Indonesians, mostly PKI members (Indonesian Communist Party), PKI supporters, peasants and workers, Socialists and Chinese. In the 15 years that followed tens of thousands of Indonesians were detained at one period or another and as Tapols denied civil rights even after release. Executions and extra-judicial killings continued routinely throughout this period. To whatever extent Suharto played a role in this butchery, and play a role he must have, his reputation is forever sullied.
Western hypocrisy
That said, it is the height of hypocrisy for Western nations, particularly the US and Britain to hold up their hands in horror at the means by which Suharto came to power, since they directly colluded in it and have blood up to their elbows. The CIA gave a death list with names of over 5,000 PKI cadres to the army for elimination and the British ran arms to the militias, who were doing the killing. Britain’s ambassador to Indonesia, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, who had had both his embassy and Rolls Royce burned about him by Sukarno’s mobs, wrote with characteristic understatement to the Foreign Office in October 1965, “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”. As far back as 1962 Prime Minister MacMillan and President John F. Kennedy had agreed that Sukarno needed to be eliminated. Again, a decade on in 1975, as a Marxist Portugal was liquidating its colonial possessions and the Americans withdrawing from Vietnam, the US, Britain and Australia all connived at Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor, an unsophisticated Australia alone making the honest mistake of recognising the fact.
The Big Domino?
Terrible as these events were, they may well have saved Indonesia and SE Asia from an even worse fate. No one can say. Consider the times. It was the height of the Cold War. Sukarno’s Indonesia, beset by poverty and famine, was not just a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, it enjoyed cordial relationships with Mao’s China and Russia. The PKI, which Sukarno used to balance the army was the third largest party in the country and a member of the Comintern dedicated to world revolution and had already attempted an armed takeover. The Communist Emergency in Malaya had barely ended, and the British were engaged in a nasty little war with Indonesia, not just in Borneo but also in Peninsular Malaysia, where Indonesian troops had been landed in an attempt to throttle a newly independent Malaysia. The US was becoming ever more directly involved in the war in South Vietnam. If Indonesia had fallen to the communists history would have taken a very different turn. A bloodbath of unimaginable proportions? Cambodia writ large? Or a strategic and fragmented archipelago of such importance and instability that it might well have set off a nuclear WW3? Who can say?
Instead of that, Suharto ended Konfrontasi and the country became the heart of the newly formed ASEAN in 1967, ending all territorial disputes with Malaysia and the Philippines, and opening the country to foreign investment, which began pouring in lifting the country out of poverty and improving the lot of every Indonesian while clearing the way for the rise of the SE Asian “Tiger” economies. Is it any wonder that Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew & Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad make a point of visiting and paying him tribute. Without Suharto, it is unlikely that Singapore would exist as a sovereign state, a fact of which Lee Kuan Yew was well aware and something smug Singaporeans when patronising their giant neighbour might do well to ponder.
The tragedy of Suharto’s rule is his failure to rein in corruption and most particularly the untrammelled greed of his children. Some US$73 billion flowed through his control in between the years 1966-97 and the World Bank estimated the Suharto family fortune as between $15 billion to $38 billion controlling 3.6 million hectares of land, an area bigger than Belgium. Trusted army colleagues such as General Benny Moerdani, who were brave enough to warn Suharto about the dangers of favouring his children so grossly, lost their jobs. Professional army men and politicians desiring and working for a modern and clean administration were all outmanoeuvred.
Take a Good Look!
If anyone wants to get a feel of what corruption on this scale really looks like, and it’s something we all should do, I recommend a visiting Dr George Aditjondro of the University of Newcastle’s report sponsored by Transparency International listing the companies connected to Suharto, his family and their cronies in the Nederlands, Belgium and Luxembourg at : <www.angelfire.com/rock/hotburrito/suharto/suhartocompanies.doc>.
It’s mindboggling! It involves some US$12 billion raised through some 200 companies spread over some 20 countries and that’s out of Benelux alone! Legal practices like Baker Mackenzie are in it up to their eyeballs, as is Mees Pierson Trust, who managed many of the 200 companies. It includes major banks, financial institutions and corporations such as HSBC, ING, ABN AMRO, Rabo Bank, Société Générale, Fortus Gp., Banque Générale, Sumitomo Bank, Hong Leong Finance, GE Capital, Brierly Investments, First Pacific Davies, FP Savills, Hoechst, General Electric, Freeport, Osprey, Berli Jucker and Promet, to name just some.
In other words, what this tells us is that Suharto, family and friends had a lot of help from a lot of top line lawyers, accountants, bankers and businessmen in a lot of big organisations in a lot of countries in the developed world who have profited hugely from the proceeds of corruption and who now point the finger at Indonesia, saying the country is soft on corruption. Do they seriously expect anyone to believe they didn’t know this was dirty money?
So going back to the UNCAC meeting just ended here in Bali, it’s worth pointing out that Germany, Italy and Japan still haven’t ratified the original UNCAC agreement yet, and that the US and its proxies have once again torpedoed putting teeth into an international agreement to take effective action. In this case by assisting countries like Indonesia to recover stolen funds from their banks financially and with legal expertise.
His Place in History?
A cynic might conclude that it is all a set up with leaders in both the developed and the developing world happy to strike the correct postures, confident in the knowledge that junior officials lacking resources and expertise to take on the complex and hugely costly legal structures in the US and Europe are extremely unlikely to bring home the bacon.
As for ex-President Suharto, his deeds both good and bad need to be recognised. Historians will probably be kind to him, noting that the good he did his country outdid the harm. For those in power who owe him their wealth and position, the best way for them to honour him for posterity is by ensuring the return of what was stolen and allowing the truth to be told of the terrible events of 1965/66, so the memory can finally be laid to rest. For if history tells us anything, it is that the ghosts remain and the dead cry out to the living until the truth is finally told. The mass killings of the bloody 20th century: we’ve seen it in Armenia, in Spain, Russia, China, Taiwan, Cambodia, Ireland, Bosnia and off to a cracking start to a new millennium - in Ruanda.
